Chrome for Android app review

Google’s popular browser has been released on Android – everyone should
download it if they can, says Matt Warman

Google’s Chrome web browser has seen huge growth on the PC, and been the subject of the search giant’s most substantial marketing campaign. The selling point is its raw speed, minimalist look and background, six-weekly updates. Even Mac users have taken to the browser with alacrity unprecedented for a Google product.

This week the company finally announced a beta version of Chrome for Android, bringing the browser’s high-speed performance to the company’s even more successful mobile phone platform. Although some might argue it’s a mystery that Chrome was not always the default browser, in fact original Android phones could barely cope with zooming in and out on the existing ‘Browser’ programme. Software and hardware are now in much better sync, although the release doesn’t come a moment too soon.

Indeed, sync is where it’s at for Chrome. The browser now takes information from a Google user's desktop Chrome use, if they’re signed in, so it provides an experience on a phone that learns from, and is very similar to, the full desktop experience. Tabs that are open on the desktop can be sent to and seen, already open, on the mobile version. So you need never lose your place on the web.

That means proper tabbed browsing, too, implemented in a way that is even better than Apple’s excellent iOS browser. Google likens it to a stack of cards in your hand, each one of them a browsing window, and that does make finding what you’re after much easier. It also means clicking on links on a browser web page does not necessarily mean you’ll lose the page where you started. In the tablet version, this is particularly good.

Chrome for Android also brings a mobile version of the desktop ‘Incognito’ mode, which means your browsing activities are not stored in the history. Whether this reflects a growth in the desire for adult content on mobile phones is a subject for debate; either way, if you’re shopping for a present and don’t want someone else who might borrow your phone to see what you’ve been considering, then this is useful.

Google claims they launched Chrome to ‘push the web forward’, and indeed the web has changed hugely since the original was launched. Chrome for Mobile, unlike the default Browser, no longer includes Adobe’s Flash software, for instance, because Google reckons that, after a period of transition, the special software is essentially redundant. This is largely thanks to Apple's iPhone not supporting Flash and forcing the reinvention of the mobile web as a consequence. Adobe has also said it’s not building future mobile versions of Flash, so consumers will have to catch up with this clear industry consensus.

It’s good to see more choice on mobile browsers, but that makes it all the more unfortunate that Chrome is neither available for iOS (perhaps for obvious reasons) nor for any version of Android other than the latest, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich. That means just one per cent of phones and tablets combined can currently use Chrome. The churn of new products and the improved upgrade cycles from manufacturers means that this is a problem that will fix itself over time.

For now, however, the existence of Chrome on mobile simply proves that some Android phones are a lot more equal than others. That, if nothing else, is an incentive to upgrade to a new handset, or at least to do so when the product comes out of beta. By then it, will, for instance, have added capabilities and the ability to differentiate more effectively between your different preferences for different website. WIth such tweaks, Chrome for Mobile may well succeed in moving the web further forward.